Ars Lyrica to stage rarely performed early Handel work at Hobby Center
Decades before “Messiah,” George Frideric Handel cut his teeth as a composer-forhire for Italian nobility. Opera was flourishing by the early 1700s, and the young German composer — then in his very early 20s — was rapidly honing his style through a succession of oratorios and cantatas. Ars Lyrica Houston will present one of them, the littleknown “Clori, Tirsi, e Fileno,” March 26 at Hobby Center’s Zilkha Hall.
“It’s an important source for the work to come in London in the coming decades,” says artistic director Matthew Dirst. “But it also reflects this kind of youthful enthusiasm, I think one could say, for this Italian style and this wholehearted embrace of it.”
Written in 1707, when Handel was working in Rome for (it’s believed) the Marchese Francesco Maria Ruspoli, “Clori” depicts a shepherdess and two shepherds competing for her affections. Ars Lyrica’s version features countertenor Key’mon Murrah as Clori, the shepherdess; and soprano Lauren Snouffer as Tirsi and contralto Cecilia McKinley as Fileno, the male roles. The gender swap came about in accordance to casting practices at the time — and due to a little expediency, Dirst says.
“We know that castrati commonly sang female parts in the early 18th century and that contraltos often sang male parts; and so here we’ve simply embraced that wholeheartedly and reversed the genders of all three,” he exSo plains, “mostly because we had singers who were available who could enable that kind of casting.”
Dramatically, “Clori” is far removed from what Italian opera would evolve into, with complicated plots and even more complex characters. Something of an exception here is the two endings Handel wrote: one in which, put off by the fickle Clori, the two shepherds decide they’d be happier with each other — homosexuality was not uncommon in Handel’s social circle, Dirst notes — while the trio is able to work out a more mutually acceptable arrangement in the other.
“We’re actually going to do both, just because they make sense together,” Dirst says. “Neither one in my opinion is expendable, because they’re both such lovely music. I didn’t want to leave them out.
that’s (an) unusual feature of this piece that you don’t find in many Handel works.”
Stories set in the countryside and populated by shepherds and other rural folk became popular during the Renaissance, thanks to the works of poets like Giovanni Battista Guarini. Musically, “Pastoral” even emerged as its own class of composition: peaceful, idyllic, restorative. Visual artists of the era were equally captivated by such ideas, and the aristocracy — who, after all, kept the money tap flowing to these artists and musicians — regarded their work as a respite (however temporary) from the increasingly crowded and unsanitary conditions of large European cities.
“It’s no surprise that people who had money and means wanted to imagine themselves in a nicer place,” says Dirst.
Still, Handel managed to instill unusual depth and brilliance into a plot that by then was already something of a cliché. “This was his biggest treatment of it outside the later operas, and in many ways I think his most charming,” Dirst says. “It puts his own style on top of this old language of the pastoral and, I think, lifts it up out of mere convention and sort of hackneyed storytelling onto a different plane.”
Eventually, Handel adapted several arias in “Clori” for later works, including “Agrippina,” “Acis and Galatea” and “Rinaldo.” (The practice was common for a time when composers on retainer could be expected to come up with a new opera in a month.) He must have known he was onto something; the piece is a longtime favorite of Dirst’s, too.
“There’s not a slow or dull moment in it,” he says. “The narrative, such as it is, goes by fairly quickly. The recitatives are short, unlike operatic recitative, which can go on for a while. The melodies, each one is a miniature masterpiece in how to construct an aria, or a duet or a trio. It’s just got one gem after the other.”